Burning Rangers is a 1998 3Daction video game developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega for the Sega Saturn. The game is set in a futuristic society threatened by frequent fires. Players control one of an elite group of firefighters, the Burning Rangers, who extinguish the fires and rescue civilians from burning buildings. Most of the tasks the players complete are centred around collecting energy crystals used to transport civilians to safety. Development began shortly after the release of Christmas Nights in November 1996, when Yuji Naka started working on a game focused on saving people rather than killing them. Sonic Team chose the themes of firefighting and heroism. Burning Rangers received mostly positive reviews, especially for the game's soundtrack and audio. Responses to the graphics were mixed; while some critics asserted that the game had the best visuals on the Saturn, others faulted its poor collision detection and occasional glitching. The game was among the final five Saturn titles released in America. (Full article...)

Ian O'Brien (born 3 March 1947) is a former breaststroke swimmer for Australia who won the 200 metre breaststroke at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo in world record time. In 1962 at the age of 15 he competed in his first national championships, winning the 220 yard breaststroke. At the 1962 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Perth, Western Australia, he won both the 110 and 220 yd breaststroke and the 4 × 110 yd medley relay. He won both breaststroke events at the 1963 Australian Championships, repeating the feat for the next three years. After winning his gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics, he added a bronze in the medley relay. O'Brien successfully defended both his breaststroke titles at the 1966 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica. He won five Commonwealth Games gold medals and claimed a total of nine individual and six relay titles at the Australian Championships. He retired from the sport at the age of 21, worked for 10 years as a television stagehand, and later launched a company that produced television documentaries. In 1986 he was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame. (Full article...)

Sabrina Sidney (1757–1843) was a British foundling girl taken in when she was 12 by the author Thomas Day, who wanted to mould her into his perfect wife. As an adult she worked with the schoolmaster Charles Burney, managing his schools. In 1769 Day took Sabrina to France to begin methods of education inspired by Rousseau's Emile, or On Education. When she reached her teenage years, Day's friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth persuaded him that his ideal-wife experiment had failed. In 1783 Sabrina was told the truth about Day's experiment and confronted him in a series of letters. In 1804, Anna Seward published a book about Sabrina's upbringing. In his 1820 memoirs, Edgeworth said that Sabrina and Day made a good match and that she loved him. Sabrina countered that Day had made her miserable, and that she had effectively been a slave. The story of Sabrina's life has been told in Wendy Moore's 2013 book How to Create the Perfect Wife and dramatised in the 2015 BBC Radio 4 play The Imperfect Education of Sabrina Sidney. (Full article...)

Myotis alcathoe, the Alcathoe bat, is a small European bat. First described in 2001 from specimens taken from Greece and Hungary, its known distribution has expanded to include parts of Western and Central Europe, Spain, Italy, the Balkans, Sweden, and Azerbaijan. It is similar to the whiskered bat (M. mystacinus), but its brown fur is distinctive, and DNA sequencing has shown it to be a separate species. M. alcathoe has a forearm length of 30.8 to 34.6 mm (1.21 to 1.36 in) and a body mass of 3.5 to 5.5 g (0.12 to 0.19 oz). The fur is brown on the wings, usually reddish-brown on the upperparts, and brown below, but more grayish in juveniles. It has a very high-pitched echolocation call, with a frequency that falls from 120 kHz to about 43 kHz at the end of the call. Usually found in old-growthdeciduous forest near water, it forages high in the canopy and above water, mostly for flies. It roosts in cavities high in trees. The species is considered at risk in Catalonia, Germany and parts of Switzerland due to its rarity and vulnerability to habitat loss. (Full article...)

The mangrove swallow (Tachycineta albilinea) is a bird in the swallow family that breeds in coastal regions of Mexico and Central America. It is a seasonal breeder and is territorial when breeding, much like the related tree swallow. Its nests are frequently found near water, no more than 2 metres (7 ft) above the ground. It usually forages close to the nest when feeding its chicks, but will go much further when foraging for itself. In between foraging attempts, it perches near water. It subsists primarily on a diet of flying insects, including dragonflies and bees, unusually large prey for a bird of its size. It has blue-green upperparts, white underparts, a white streak above the eye, and blackish flight and tail feathers. This swallow's song is a soft trilling, with a rolled jeerrt call, and a sharp alarm note. With a slowly decreasing population of at least 500,000 individuals, the mangrove swallow is classified as a species of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. (Full article...)

Negotiations between German commanders and the Yugoslav Partisans commenced on 11 March 1943 during an Axis offensive in World War II. Focused on obtaining a ceasefire and establishing a prisoner exchange, the talks were also used to delay the Axis forces while the Partisans crossed the Neretva river and began attacking their Chetnik rivals, led by Draža Mihailović. The talks were accompanied by an informal ceasefire that lasted about six weeks before being called off by Adolf Hitler. The advantage gained by the Partisans was lost when another Axis offensive was launched in mid-May 1943. Some parts of the negotiations were published from 1949 onwards, but many details were little known by historians until the 1970s, including the identity of the chief Partisan negotiator, Milovan Đilas(pictured). The US diplomat Walter Roberts published a description of the talks in 1973 in a well-received book that was protested by the Yugoslav government of Josip Broz Tito for its depiction of the Partisans. Beginning in the 1980s, accounts of the negotiations were published by Yugoslav historians and the main Yugoslav protagonists. (Full article...)

Hugh de Neville (died 1234) was the Chief Forester under the kings Richard I, John, and Henry III of England, and a sheriff of several counties over his lifetime. Neville was related to royal officials and a bishop, and was a member of Prince Richard's household. After Richard became king in 1189, Neville continued in his service, accompanying him on the Third Crusade. Neville remained in the royal service following Richard's death in 1199 and the accession of King John to the throne, becoming one of the new king's favourites and often gambling with him. He was named in Magna Carta as one of John's principal advisers, considered by a medieval chronicler to be one of King John's "evil counsellors". He deserted John after the French invasion of England in 1216, but returned to pledge his loyalty to John's son Henry III after the latter's accession to the throne that year. Neville's royal service continued until his death in 1234, though by then he was a less significant figure than he had been at the height of his powers. (Full article...)

Allah jang Palsoe (Malay for The False God) is a 1919 stage drama from the Dutch East Indies that was written by the ethnic Chinese author Kwee Tek Hoay, based on E. Phillips Oppenheim's short story "The False Gods". Over six acts, the Malay-language play follows two brothers, one a devout son who holds firmly to his morals and personal honour, the other a man who worships money and prioritises personal gain. The two learn over the course of a decade that money (the titular false god) is not the path to happiness. Kwee Tek Hoay's first stage play, Allah jang Palsoe was written as a realist response to whimsical contemporary theatre. Though the published stageplay sold poorly and the play was deemed difficult to perform, Allah jang Palsoe found success on the stage. By 1930 it had been performed by various ethnic Chinese troupes to popular acclaim, and had pioneered a body of work by authors such as Lauw Giok Lan, Tio Ie Soei, and Tjoa Tjien Mo. In 2006 the script for the play, which continues to be performed, was republished with updated spelling by the Lontar Foundation. (Full article...)

The Seri Rambai is a 17th-century Dutch cannon displayed at Fort Cornwallis in George Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site city and capital of the Malaysian state of Penang. It is a fertility symbol, the subject of legends and prophecy, and the largest bronze gun in Malaysia. The cannon's history in the Malacca Straits began in the early 1600s when Dutch East India Company officers gave it to the Sultan of Johor in return for trading concessions. Less than a decade later, after Johor was destroyed and the sultan captured, the Seri Rambai was taken to Aceh. Near the end of the eighteenth century the cannon was sent to Selangor and mounted next to one of the town's hilltop forts. In 1871 pirates seized a Penang junk, murdered its passengers and crew, and took the stolen vessel to Selangor. The British colonial government responded by burning the town, destroying its forts and confiscating the Seri Rambai. Originally displayed on Penang's Esplanade, the gun was moved in the 1950s to the ramparts at Fort Cornwallis. (Full article...)

Neal Dow (March 20, 1804 – October 2, 1897) was an American prohibition advocate and politician. He was elected president of the Maine Temperance Union in 1850, and mayor of Portland the next year. Soon after, largely due to his efforts, the state legislature banned the sale and production of alcohol in what became known as the Maine Law. As mayor, Dow enforced the law with vigor and called for increasingly harsh penalties for violators. In 1855, his opponents rioted and he ordered the state militia to fire on the crowd. One man was killed and several were wounded. After public reaction to the violence turned against him, he chose not to run again for mayor. He was later elected to two terms in the state legislature, but retired after a financial scandal. He joined the Union Army shortly after the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 and became a brigadier general. He was wounded at the siege of Port Hudson and later captured. After being exchanged for another officer in 1864, Dow resigned from the military and devoted himself once more to prohibition. In 1880, he headed the Prohibition Party ticket for President of the United States. (Full article...)

The Oran fatwa was an Islamic legal opinion issued in 1504 to address the forced conversion to Christianity of Muslims in the Crown of Castile in Iberia in 1500–1502. The fatwa sets out detailed relaxations of the sharia (Islamic law) requirements, allowing the Muslims to conform outwardly to Christianity and perform acts that are ordinarily forbidden in Islamic law, when necessary to survive. It includes relaxed instructions to fulfill the ritual prayers, charity and purification, and recommendations for how to handle obligations that violated Islamic law, such as worshipping as Christians, performing blasphemy, and consuming pork and wine. The fatwa enjoyed wide currency in Spain among Muslims and Moriscos – Muslims nominally converted to Christianity and their descendants – from the time of the first forced conversions up to the expulsion of the Moriscos (1609–1614). The author of the fatwa was Ahmad ibn Abi Jum'ah, a North African Islamic law scholar (mufti) of the Maliki school. (Full article...)

Jean Bellette (25 March 1908 – 16 March 1991) was an Australian artist. Born in Tasmania, she was educated in Hobart and at Julian Ashton's art school in Sydney, where her teachers included Thea Proctor. In London she studied under painters Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler. A modernist painter, Bellette was influential in mid-twentieth-century Sydney art circles. She frequently painted scenes influenced by the Greek tragedies of Euripedes, Sophocles and Homer. The only woman to win the Sulman Prize more than once, Bellette claimed the accolade in 1942 with For Whom the Bell Tolls, and in 1944 with Iphigenia in Tauris. She helped found the Blake Prize for religious art, and was its inaugural judge. Bellette and her husband, the artist and critic Paul Haefliger, owned a cottage in Hill End, an old gold mining village in central New South Wales. Bellette bequeathed the cottage to the National Parks and Wildlife Service (which manages the Hill End historic site) for use as an artists' retreat. It continues to operate for that purpose. (Full article...)

Mayabazar (Market of Illusions) is an Indian epicfantasy film directed by Kadiri Venkata Reddy and produced by B. Nagi Reddy and Aluri Chakrapani, first released on 27 March 1957. The film was shot in Telugu and Tamil with the same title, but with a few differences in the cast. The story is an adaptation of the folk tale Sasirekha Parinayam, which in turn is based on the epic Mahabharata. It tells the story of Krishna (N. T. Rama Rao) and Ghatotkacha (S. V. Ranga Rao), who try to reunite Arjuna's son Abhimanyu with his love, Balarama's daughter (Savitri). Though Rama Rao was initially reluctant to play the lead role, his portrayal of Krishna received acclaim and yielded more offers to reprise the same role in several unrelated films. Most of the musical score was composed by Ghantasala. Both versions of the film were critically and commercially successful. The film is considered a landmark in both Telugu and Tamil cinema, with praise for its cast and technical accomplishments, despite the limitations of the technology at the time. A May 2013 CNN-News18 poll listed Mayabazar as the greatest Indian film of all time. (Full article...)

The Cincinnati Musical Center half dollar is a commemorative coin that was authorized on March 31, 1936, and struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint that year. Produced with the stated purpose of commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Cincinnati as a center of music, it was conceived by Thomas G. Melish, a coin enthusiast whose group bought the entire issue from the government, and who resold them at high prices. Melish had hired sculptor Constance Ortmayer to design the coin, but the Commission of Fine Arts objected to Stephen Foster being on the obverse, finding no connection between Foster, who died in 1864, and the supposed anniversary. Nevertheless, 5,000 sets of three coins, one from each of the three mints, were issued and sold to Melish's group, the only authorized purchaser. He likely held back much of the issue for later resale, and with few pieces available, prices spiked to over five times the issue price. The coins are still valuable today. Melish has been assailed by numismatic writers as greedy. (Full article...)